Benois Madonna, series of drawings for a Virgin and Child

In January 1478 we have the first record of Leonardo being given an important independent commission, the altar-piece in the Chapel of St Bernard in the Signoria, Florence. For some unknown reason it was never painted, and the work was done by Filippino Lippi. The Anonimo Gaddiano says that he worked "on the design of Leonardo", but Filippino's altar-piece, which is now in the Uffizi, shows no connection with Leonardo either in spirit or design. To the same year belongs a drawing of two heads with a fragmentary inscription which mentions the town of Pistoja and states that in the autumn of 1478 Leonardo had begun two pictures of the Madonna--... bre 1478 inchominciai le Vergine Marie. One of these must almost certainly be the so-called Benois Madonna, now in the Hermitage. The Benois Madonna, the latest of the four pictures painted in the 1470's, is the one which is most generally accepted by the critics. Indeed, it is the unquestionable authenticity of this picture which has driven all but the most idealistic critics to accept the other three. The Benois Madonna does not owe this position so much to its intrinsic merits as to the fact that there exist several drawings for the composition which are undeniably by Leonardo. Here, for the first time, we are able to study his art with a method which is always illuminating, namely by comparing his drawings with his finished pictures. And immediately we find evidence of a conflict: the conflict between spontaneity and perfection. With the drawings for the Benois Madonna we may also consider a rather more numerous series of drawings for a Virgin and Child, now lost, in which the Child is playing with a cat or tame weasel, and by treating these Madonna studies as a single group we can take a wider basis for our generalisations. These studies are so perfectly fresh and natural that they are now amongst the most popular of all Leonardo's drawings. They show, as nothing else in his work, a direct and happy approach to life; and they show his matchless quickness of vision, which allowed him to convey every movement or gesture with the certainty and unconscious grace of a great dancer performing an easy step. In one sense the word 'certainty' does not apply to these early drawings. Technically they are still experimental. The line is recklessly free; sometimes they are scrawled over and covered with blots and washes of sepia so that they resemble drawings of the seventeenth century--Rembrandt or Guercino. But the general effect is one of a graceful speed and of a hunter's certainty of eye. The largest and most beautiful of this series is a study in the Louvre of the Virgin holding out a plate of fruit to the Infant Christ, in a pose close to that of the Benois Madonna. It is drawn with a few rapid and summary strokes, as though Leonardo's whole aim had been to note down action; and yet he has achieved a perfect composition. The rhythmic relation of the two heads is as spontaneous and as inevitable as the relation between two bars of Mozart.

In the Benois Madonna this unity of effect is lost. What has come between the sketch and the picture? To answer this question we must glance for a moment at the two traditions which divided Florentine art of the fifteenth century. One of these is the tradition of linear grace and fancy, the tradition of Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Filippo and Botticelli; the other is the tradition of scientific naturalism founded by Masaccio and kept alive in Leonardo's own day by his master Verrocchio. Inevitably these traditions overlapped. Botticelli had a phase of naturalism; Pollajuolo belongs as much to one side as the other. Leonardo, as we see from his drawings, belonged by nature to the first group. But by training he was of the second, and his powerful intellect led him to sympathise with the scientific approach. Thus between the sketch and the picture he was forced to attempt a complete change of mood and to adapt his fleeting visions to the severe standards of academic Florentine art. We have plenty of evidence how this adaptation was effected. First come the studies of action, just described, the motives which are later to be used in the picture. Then come what I may call the diagrams. These are usually quite small drawings, done from memory, and are syntheses of the most satisfactory motives. One of the diagrams for the Benois Madonna has survived and is typical in severity; typical, also, in that Leonardo has followed it closely. So far I imagine that his powers were perfectly uninhibited, and had he been content to rely on suggestion rather than complete statement, like Rembrandt, or to accept the formulae of his time, like Raphael, he might have been a prolific painter. But he would neither improvise nor conform. He determined to work out every detail according to his own standard of perfection, a standard which included scientific accuracy, pictorial logic and finish. To achieve this ideal, the period between the sketch or diagram and the finished picture was one of intense intellectual effort, in which every detail was studied and assimilated to a satisfactory form.

This stage, too, we know from drawings, highly finished studies of detail, which often tell us more about Leonardo's final intentions than the actual picture; because by the time he began to paint, constant labours and anxieties had so deprived him of all appetite for his subject that his pictures were either left unfinished, or, as with the Benois Madonna, were carried through without that vitality, that spontaneous rendering of action, which was the original motive of his whole conception.